Gauss Centre for Supercomputing Allocates ~440 Mill Computing Core Hours to European Research

Berlin/Germany, February 28, 2014 – The Gauss Centre for Supercomputing continues to significantly contribute to European large-scale scientific and engineering research activities. The most recent Call for Proposals by PRACE, the Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe, resulted in the allocation of 438+ mill core hours of computing time on the GCS supercomputing infrastructure to 20 projects from ten different European countries. Researchers awarded access to the supercomputing infrastructure of the three GCS member centres HLRS, LRZ, and JSC may use their allocated core hours for a period of 12 months, starting in March 2014.

The 8th PRACE Regular Call for Proposals, which was open from Sept. 3 until Oct. 1, 2013, yielded a total of 124 eligible proposals of which 44 were accepted. All proposals submitted undergo a very strict and clearly defined peer-review process in which the scientific excellence and technical maturity of the proposed projects is assessed by leading scientists and highly qualified technical experts. This procedure ensures that European researchers are granted access to a Tier-0 infrastructure from the European network of HPC systems that serves their needs best—in terms of the computational infrastructure as well as the available scientific expertise—to ensure optimal project support.

The 20 projects allotted to the three national HPC systems Hermit of HLRS Stuttgart, SuperMUC of LRZ Garching near Munich, and JUQUEEN of JSC Jülich, represent a variety of scientific domains. The majority of the 438,098,435 mill core hours allotted, though, will serve projects from scientific fields that the three GCS centres put special focus on, although not exclusively:

The bi-annual PRACE calls take turn with the bi-annual GCS Calls for Large Scale Projects through which German researchers exclusively can apply for access to the HPC infrastructure provided by GCS. These two options, together with allocations granted by the three GCS centres directly, open researchers a variety of access routes to world-class HPC resources.

About GCS

The Gauss Centre for Supercomputing (GCS) combines the three national supercomputing centres HLRS (High Performance Computing Center Stuttgart), JSC (Jülich Supercomputing Centre), and LRZ (Leibniz Supercomputing Centre, Garching near Munich) into Germany’s Tier-0 supercomputing institution. Concertedly, the three centres provide the largest and most powerful supercomputer infrastructure in all of Europe to serve a wide range of industrial and research activities in various disciplines. They also provide top-class training and education for the national as well as the European High Performance Computing (HPC) community. GCS is the German member of PRACE (Partnership for Advance Computing in Europe), an international non-profit association consisting of 25 member countries, whose representative organizations create a pan-European supercomputing infrastructure, providing access to computing and data management resources and services for large-scale scientific and engineering applications at the highest performance level.

GCS is jointly funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research and the federal states of Baden-Württemberg, Bavaria and North Rhine-Westphalia.